Sabayon Business Edition 1.0: Easy Gentoo for the office?

Sabayon Business Edition 1.0 is the latest release from Sabayon Linux, the distribution developed by the famous (in Gentoo circles) Fabio Erculiani, also known as “lxnay.” Sabayon is a pre-compiled version of Gentoo with many tweaks and a bent for the cutting-edge. The distribution at first glance is geared to those looking for the maximum in eye candy and gaming ability, which is what makes the latest release surprising. Business Edition aims to be a stable OS aimed at productivity.This OS is based on the Gentoo “stable” branch, whereas all previous Sabayon releases have been based on the “testing” branch. As the names suggest, the system’s software is well-tested and should be very stable.

Live CD

The Live CD (technically, DVD) took quite a while to boot. I notice that much of this time was spend setting up OpenGL, which was surprising, mainly because this version includes no 3D desktop software whatsoever. This is one kink that needs to be worked out of the Business Edition Live CD. Beyond that, the Live system works as perfectly as a live system can. My wireless was detected, and all applications worked as expected.

Installation

Although there are FTP and HTTP mirrors to download Sabayon, users are strongly encouraged to use the torrents, as it usually ensures that the downloaded file will have no flaws, while reducing the strain on Sabayon’s servers. Download speed for me varied, slowing to 40KB/s at times, but at other times topping out my bandwidth. In the end, it took about five hours to download the 1.8GB file, which isn’t too bad.

Sabayon Business Edition's the first Gentoo-based distro I've ever installed. As mentioned elsewhere, KDE's ARTS sound daemon had problems playing sound files in Ogg Vorbis format (unknown why). I also had problems with OpenOffice.org crashing, but I now know the problem happened after I messed around with a profile in Portage, which did something...I'm not sure what...to break it. Something GTK-related, probably.

Fried CPU's review, linked here, mentions booting being slow, then speeding up. Since Sabayon B.E. has bootsplash, you can't see the messages, but there's something it's either profiling or caching after running each service upon first boot. After that, it boots normally.

Portage, emerge, USE flags, overlays, blocked packages -- all that takes some getting used to. But the thing I really don't "get" about Gentoo is why you'd want a distro that takes 24 hours (guessing - I terminated it after 15 hours with no end in sight) to "emerge" a package like OpenOffice.org. What's the benefit of that?

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